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I've always hated Moxie's stance on federation and alternative clients. As a result I've never promoted Signal among my friends as an alternative for WhatsApp.

I've always hated Moxie's stance on federation and alternative clients. As a result I've never promoted Signal among my friends as an alternative for WhatsApp. I strongly believe in federation and open client ecosystems. Matrix is ideal for me but people don't seem to like it. I'm kinda hoping that signal will change now that Moxie is gone.

Aachen 4y ago
I mean, I see it the same way, but it's still better than running on centralized Facebook or Telegram infrastructure. What do you recommend to your family instead, or are they all still on WhatsApp / plain text SMS for this reason? For me, comparing Wire, Signal, Threema as the most mature and stable e2ee messengers that have any kind of network effect (so people will grow the network beyond just talking to this weirdo called Aachen), Signal has by far the largest network effect and by a very small margin the best user experience. My family is on Signal now and I was regretting not going for Wire (which has more features and fewer connectivity problems) until I needed to use Wire on Android again a few weeks ago and the Android user experience turns out to have degraded severely. The only realistic alternative I'd see to Signal, Wire or Threema (all centralized, though Wire has some enterprise on-prem thing I'm not familiar with) is self hosting something that just uses TLS to the server, but then you're always going to be on call and they won't use it with anyone else, also because you can always read all their messages. A friend has a matrix server (UX on Element is awful and buggy as heck) and every few weeks there's some problem and we temporarily fall back to Wire, and when that doesn't work, back to Signal, and when that doesn't work, calling.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  My family are all on WhatsApp yes. I don't have the energy to push them to move over especially because they also have their circles that use WhatsApp. So I decided to just set up Matrix Bridges and get all that shit (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord) off my phone, I use them all through Element now. But I'm not going to do free promotion for what is yet another walled garden. PS: Element works pretty well for me, and it gives me the added benefit of having all my chats stored in one place. Also gives me the ability to read chats that have been deleted by the user, make copies of what people put in their WhatsApp 'status updates' etc.

Aachen 4y ago

I mean, I see it the same way, but it's still better than running on centralized Facebook or Telegram infrastructure. What do you recommend to your family instead, or are they all still on WhatsApp / plain text SMS for this reason? For me, comparing Wire, Signal, Threema as the most mature and stable e2ee messengers that have any kind of network effect (so people will grow the network beyond just talking to this weirdo called Aachen), Signal has by far the largest network effect and by a very small margin the best user experience. My family is on Signal now and I was regretting not going for Wire (which has more features and fewer connectivity problems) until I needed to use Wire on Android again a few weeks ago and the Android user experience turns out to have degraded severely. The only realistic alternative I'd see to Signal, Wire or Threema (all centralized, though Wire has some enterprise on-prem thing I'm not familiar with) is self hosting something that just uses TLS to the server, but then you're always going to be on call and they won't use it with anyone else, also because you can always read all their messages. A friend has a matrix server (UX on Element is awful and buggy as heck) and every few weeks there's some problem and we temporarily fall back to Wire, and when that doesn't work, back to Signal, and when that doesn't work, calling.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
My family are all on WhatsApp yes. I don't have the energy to push them to move over especially because they also have their circles that use WhatsApp. So I decided to just set up Matrix Bridges and get all that shit (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord) off my phone, I use them all through Element now. But I'm not going to do free promotion for what is yet another walled garden. PS: Element works pretty well for me, and it gives me the added benefit of having all my chats stored in one place. Also gives me the ability to read chats that have been deleted by the user, make copies of what people put in their WhatsApp 'status updates' etc.